I can hardly believe how fast this year has flown by. My favorite SQL Server conference of the year, the PASS Summit, is just next week! I can hardly wait! This conference is one of the largest SQL Server and BI conferences of the year, planned and coordinated by the community for the community. It’s happening next week in Seattle, WA, and has over 200 fantastic sessions by the people that have been educating most of us for our entire careers.

It’ll be a crazy week of high-speed education, catching up with old friends, networking with new ones, sending random photos and posts on Twitter, and creating great memories to be retold over the next year.

If you are going to be there, I’d love to meet up! Ping me on Twitter and we’ll definitely get together. Networking is the best part of the Summit, and I encourage you to say hi to random strangers, go to after-hours events that you might ordinarily not attend, and make the most of this tight-knit and close community. Say hi to people! Strike up random conversations. Sit at tables with strangers. The friends you make will last a lifetime. Check out the after-hour gatherings because the list of gatherings and events is longer than my arm!

I’m also honored to have two sessions to present at this year’s Summit. I am thrilled to be able to present at this conference again this year. I know virtualization is not something most DBAs have direct hands-on experience with, but virtualization is here to stay. You will be a better DBA if you have a solid understanding of the technology and how it directly impacts your role as an enterprise-level DBA. I encourage you to join me in my sessions listed below.

Virtualizing your top-tier production SQL Servers is not as easy as P2V’ing it. Sometimes allocating more resources to the VM is the wrong approach, and getting it wrong will silently hurt performance. What is the most effective method for determining the ‘right’ amount of resources to allocate? What happens if the workload changes a month from now?

The methods for understanding the performance of your mission-critical SQL Servers gathered over the past ten years of SQL Server virtualization will be addressed, and valuable processes for performance statistic collection and analysis will be displayed. Come learn how to properly ‘right-size’ the resources allocated to a VM, improve the performance of your SQL Servers, and keep it maximized well into the future.

Your SQL Servers are probably virtualized by now, but are they running at their absolute peak performance? How can you tell? When properly configured and maintained, a virtualized SQL Server will be at least as fast as the system that it came from, if not better. If not properly configured, silent performance killers can wreck your virtualization experience. This session will give you tips and tricks to maximize performance while giving you talking points so you can convince your infrastructure engineers to design the virtualization stack your way. This session goes deep into the architecture and methodology for squeezing the best possible performance from your virtualized SQL Server, and includes valuable tips on topics such as host-level over-commitment, storage performance, In-memory OLTP, and more!

Also, the Friday evening after the Summit wraps up, I’m planning some sort of energetic adventure for us geeks! Last year fourteen of us went high-speed go-karting at the GoPro Motorplex just north of Charlotte. This year keep an eye on this blog for the official announcement for what we are up to and when / where to meet up! Here are a couple of photos from the fun we had last year. You are all invited to come with us, and it’s something I hope to make a tradition going forward!

I am greatly looking forward to this conference, and cannot wait to see you there. If you are not able to make this one, make plans to attend next year. It’s the best thing you can do for your career as a SQL Server professional.

By continuing to use the site, you agree to the use of cookies. more information

The cookie settings on this website are set to "allow cookies" to give you the best browsing experience possible. If you continue to use this website without changing your cookie settings or you click "Accept" below then you are consenting to this.